Barbara Hardy is a poet, autobiographer and novelist, as well as a critic whose books include three on George Eliot and three on Dickens. She is Emeritus Professor at Birbeck, University of London, Honorary Professor of the University of Wales, Swansea, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy.

• Acknowledgments; Editions and Works Cited; Preface; 1. A Career and its Context; 2. Dickens discusses Creativity; 3. Awareness of Art in Sketches By Boz, Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol and The Chimes; 4. The Artist as Narrator in Doctor Marigold, David Copperfield, Bleak House and Great Expectations; 5. Talkative Men and Women; 6. Imaginative Extremes, Norms and Negations; 7. Subversions and Oppositions; 8. Crises of Imagination; 9. Forecast and Fantasy in Little Dorrit; 10. Creative Conversation in Hard Times, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend; 11. Assertions of Style: Rhythm and Repetition in A Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend; 12. Dialogues with Shakespeare in David Copperfield and Great Expectations; 13. Dickens in the Twentieth Century; Index.

'Hardy's detailed knowledge of the novels, particularly the early works, is evident as she ranges widely among them' - Modern Language Review, January 2010